Man Convicted of Counterfeiting Money… Again
A federal jury found Jacob Kirkley guilty of counterfeiting for a second time. Kirkley spent 27 months in prison on a previous counterfeiting charge. Photo credit: Vermillion County, Ill. Sheriff's Department.
Kirkley is set to be sentenced on May 2, 2025, but since he was under supervised release, he likely awaits a lengthy prison sentence. He faces statutory penalties that could lead to an imprisonment of up to 20 years, along with a $250,000 fine for each of the five counts of conviction.
The Current Case
During two days of testimony, the government proved that Kirkley sold $1000 to an undercover officer on Dec. 7, 2023. An investigation revealed that Kirkley’s cost in making the counterfeit currency was approximately $250. On Jan. 8, 2024, Kirkley sold another $1000 and $5000 in counterfeit U.S. currency that he had made to the same officer, according to the indictment in the case.
On Jan. 11, 2024, the Secret Service and local cops executed a federal search warrant at Kirkley’s residence in Bismarck and recovered additional counterfeit currency, as well as various items used to create counterfeit currency.
Previous Conviction
This was not Kirkley’s first run-in with counterfeiting laws.
In 2022, Kirkley was convicted for one count of manufacturing fake U. S. dollar bills and an additional two counts of passing those fake bills after a 2020 incident where a Vermilion County Sheriff’s Deputy found over $20,000 of counterfeit U.S. dollars in his truck and then learned Kirkley had passed counterfeit money at a few local businesses in Illinois.
When cops subsequently searched Kirkley’s hotel room in Danville, Ill., they recovered $20,000 in counterfeit currency, four printers, a paper cutter and other counterfeiting tools.
Kirkley spent 27 months in prison for this reason, and at the time of his second arrest, he was under a three-year term of federal supervised release.
Counterfeit iPhones
This case is the second bizarre counterfeit story that occurred recently.
In October 2024, Haotian Sun, 34, from China, living in Baltimore, and Pengfei Xue, 34, from China, living in Germantown, Maryland, were found guilty and sentenced for defrauding Apple Inc. out of about 6,000 iPhones after turning counterfeit iPhones in for warranty service and receiving legitimate ones in return. The scheme cost the company over a million dollars, according to previous coverage by The Daily Muck.
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